A Method of Functional Alignment Verification in Hierarchical Enterprise Models

Published in: BUSITAL'06 A workshop on Business/IT Alignment and Interoperability

Publication date: 2006

Enterprise modeling involves multiple domains of expertise: requirements engineering, business process modeling, IT development etc. Our experience has shown that hierarchical enterprise models, made of an assembly of system models, are effective. In these models, two hierarchies exist: an organizational level hierarchy (describing systems' construction) and a functional level hierarchy (describing systems' functionality). Using a uniform hierarchical modeling language, system models at different hierarchical levels can be aligned in the context of the enterprise model. Using an operational semantics, each system model can be translated into executable code for model simulation and testing. The possibility to simulate and test models leads to the alignment verification for all system models across both hierarchies. In this paper we propose a method and tool for functional alignment verification. We use the Abstract State Machine (ASM) and the ASM language (AsmL) to formalize our graphical models for simulation and testing. We illustrate this approach with an example.